Monday 29 April, during the morning hours, a bomb blast near a school in central Damascus, targeting Prime Minister al-Halqi, who is chairing the Syrian National Dialog, killed at least 19 and wounded 25 civilians. Al-Halqi was not hurt during the terrorist attack in al-Mezze, Damascus. The attack is likely to be a desperate attempt to derail the National Dialog in the light of the dialog´s success and military failure of the NATO – backed mercenary corps in Syria.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Barack Obama said they were ready to do everything necessary to settle the conflict in Syria.
Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov said that Putin and Obama discussed the Syrian issue during a telephone conversation the two had on Monday.
”The two sides stressed the importance of the fact that Kerry [U.S. Secretary of State] and Lavrov [Russian Foreign Minister] were in constant contact and were trying to develop some joint steps,” Ushakov said.
Ushakov said: ”The readiness to take all necessary measures to finally resolve the Syrian issue was stressed as well.”

It’s inadmissible to speculate on the issue of weapons of mass destruction for geopolitical purposes, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a question and answer session in Moscow earlier today. He specifically elaborated on war chemicals in Syria.
According to him, this is by no means the first time that the issue has surfaced at a news briefing. Reports to that end are not always well-founded, Lavrov said.

Russia has warned the West against using a search for chemical weapons in Syria as an attempt to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
”There are governments and outside players that believe that all means are appropriate [to be used] to overthrow the Syrian regime,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday.
Referring to the use of chemical weapons by foreign-backed militants on March 19 near the city of Aleppo, where 25 people were killed and 86 injured, Lavrov criticized UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for his call on a UN fact-finding mission to investigate unproven claims about the use of chemical weapons in Syria in December 2012.
”This demand by the [UN] secretary-general with reference to a forgotten episode reminds us a great deal of attempts in Syria to introduce a practice analogous to that which existed in Iraq, when they were looking for weapons of mass destruction there,” Lavrov added.

British MPs have demanded that the government provides evidence on its claims that sarin chemical agent was found in soil samples from Syria.
The call has been made over fears that the government’s claims are another trick similar to the fabricated claims by the British and American governments back in 2003 that former Iraqi dictator Saddam had ready-to-launch weapons of mass destruction, an excuse that was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations Bashar al-Jaafari says Britain and France are trying to undermine Damascus’s official request from the United Nation to investigate chemical weapons use in Aleppo.
Al-Jaafari said in an interview with the Lebanese NBN TV channel that the western governments seek to repeat the Iraqi scenario in Syria through questioning its sovereignty by opening its borders to undisciplined inspections by the UN under the pretext of chemical weapons use.
Al-Jaffari said the western sides do not want an investigation to take place suggesting they know full well that the anti-government militants used chemical agents in the town of Khan al-Asal, near Aleppo, and elsewhere.

Delegates at an international peace conference in Turkey have blamed the United States and some of its allies in the Middle East for creating the crisis in Syria, Press TV reports.
The participants from twenty-three different nationalities at the conference in Istanbul said on Sunday that the imperialistic designs of the US, certain Western states, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are to blame for the crisis, Press TV’s Istanbul correspondent Serena Shim reported.